In part one of this article, we discussed the manuscript evidence for the Bible, and how the allegation of wholesale editing in the fourth century (which is a very popular argument) does not hold any water. Yet, this is just the shallow end of the pool when it comes to the textual issues of the Bible. There have been more scholarly and nuanced attacks upon the integrity of the New Testament, which carry more weight to their arguments than the average layman who has only heard of Michael Baigent or Dan Brown. To this, we shall now turn.

Textual Criticism and Alleged Corruption

Anybody who knows anything about textual criticism of the New Testament has undoubtedly heard of Bart Ehrman and his bestselling book, Misquoting Jesus. When he published his book back in 2005, Ehrman became one of the oft-cited textual scholars by both atheist and Muslim critics of the bible because of the case that he attempts to present against the textual reliability of the New Testament. Ehrman’s case can be summed up in what he wrote in his introduction to the book:

It is one thing to say that the originals were inspired, but the reality is that we don’t have the originals—so saying they were inspired doesn’t help me much, unless I can reconstruct the originals. moreover, the vast majority of Christians for the entire history of the church have not had access to the originals, making their inspiration something of a moot point. Not only do we not have the originals, we don’t have the first copies of the originals. We don’t even have the copies of the copies of the originals, or the copies of the copies of the copies of the originals. What we have are copies made later—much later. In most instances, they are copies made many centuries later. And these copies all differ from one another, in many thousands of places. As we will see later in this book, these copies differ from one another so many places that we don’t even know how many differences there are. Possibly it is easiest to put it in comparative terms: there are more differences among our manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament.[1]

This is the man who is often lauded these days as the one who has “exposed” the secrets of textual criticism to the light of day. However, most of the arguments in the book have more to do with shock value (sadly, most Christians are ignorant about these issues, so its easy to shock them with these kinds of things) and misinterpretation of facts (which we will be delving more into as we go along). Most of the things Ehrman says is really nothing new for those who are familiar with textual criticism. Many textual critics, such as the Alands, Nicholas Perrin, Daniel Wallace, and Bruce Metzger (whom was actually Erhman’s mentor), have known about these issues for decades, and they do not interpret the facts the way Ehrman does. Dr. Daniel Wallace, one of the few textual scholars who can hold a candle to Ehrman in terms of influence in the field of New Testament textual criticism, wrote a comprehensive revew of his work entitled, The Gospel According to Bart. Here, Dr. Wallace shows the various flaws in Ehrman’s thinking, especially the unbalanced view that he holds concerning the reliability of the Bible:

What strikes me as most remarkable in all this is how much Ehrman tied inerrancy to the general historical reliability of the Bible. It was an all-or-nothing proposition for him. He still seems to see things in black and white terms… There thus seems to be no middle ground in his view of the text. In short, Ehrman seems to have held to what I would call a ‘domino view of doctrine.’ When one falls down, they all fall down.

…it seems that Bart’s black and white mentality as a fundamentalist has hardly been affected as he slogged through the years and trials of life and learning, even when he came out on the other side of the theological spectrum. He still sees things without sufficient nuancing, he overstates his case, and he is entrenched in the security that his own views are right.[2]

Aside from this, it should also be pointed out that he does not even go as far as many who wish to use his writings to attack the reliability of the Bible go, as evidenced by certain portions of his own writings where he shows a bit more conservatism in his view of the Scriptural text:

These are questions that plague textual critics, and that have led some to argue that we should abandon any quest for the original text—since we can’t even agree on what it might mean to talk about the “original” of, say, Galatians or John. For my part however, I continue to think that even if we cannot be 100 percent certain about what we can attain to, we can at least be certain that all surviving manuscripts were copied from other manuscripts, which were themselves copied from other manuscripts, and that it is at least possible to get back to the oldest and earliest stage of the manuscript tradition for each of the books of the New Testament. All our manuscripts of Galatians, for example, evidently go back to some text that was copied; all our manuscripts of John evidently go back to a version of John that included the prologue and chapter 21. And so we must rest content knowing that getting back to the earliest attainable version is the best we can do, whether or not we have reached back to the “original” text. This oldest form of the text is no doubt closely (very closely) related to what the author originally wrote, and so it is the basis for our interpretation of his teaching.[3]

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(Note: Due to the length of this article, I am dividing it into two separate posts. This will be part one of the article. Part two will be posted later this week, Lord Willing)

Introduction

In the past few decades, one of the staple arguments used by those who seek to discredit the authority of the Bible has been to allege that the scriptural text has become lost due to corruption. This may have happened over the course of the centuries, or during a decisive period in the history of the Christian church.And this kind of attack can come from almost any angle. Anybody who has encountered Islamic apologists, for example, will undoubtedly have heard the charge that the Bible (which was inspired by God in its original form) has been changed. The level of knowledge these apologists actually have, of course, varies. Some are absolutely clueless regarding the textual history of the bible, and are merely repeating canards taught to them by their imams. Others are a bit more sophisticated, and may rely on liberal scholarship to substantiate their point.

But how well does this argument stand when the claims in question are actually examined? It is well worth going over the textual history of the bible and the manuscripts that have come down to us over the centuries in order to see whether we still have the bible that God originally revealed to us, or whether it has been “lost in transmission” during the course of time.

Counting the Manuscript Evidence

The Bible did not always exist as this book with a leather cover, gold-gilded pages and thumb-indexing that one can simply buy at any bookstore today. Like any other ancient document, the Bible has a textual history. It has been handed down to us through generations of constant copying. The result of this is that we have thousands of manuscripts of the bible. As Drs. Norman Geisler and William Nix put it in  their General Introduction to the Bible,

The fidelity of the New Testament text rests on a multitude of manuscript evidence. Counting Greek copies alone, the New Testament is preserved in some 5,656 partial and complete manuscript portions that were copied by hand from the second through the fifteenth centuries.[1]

And yet we did not always have this wealth of manuscripts. Back in the 19th century, we did not have as many manuscripts available to us. They have been accumulated over the past two centuries by various persons who have worked hard to locate these ancient manuscripts. In The Text of the New Testament, Bruce Metzger recounts the story of how the 19th century textual scholar Constantin Von Tischendorf discovered one particularly important biblical manuscript from an old monastery:

In 1844, when he was not yet thirty years of age, Tischendorf, a Privatdozent in the University of Leipzig, began an extensive journey through the Near East in search of Biblical manuscripts. While visiting the monastery of St. Catharine at Mount Sinai, he chanced to see some leaves of parchment in a waste-basket full of papers destine dto light the oven of the monastery. On examination these proved to be part of a copy of the Septuagint version of the Old Testament, written in an early Greek uncial script. He retrieved from the basket no fewer than forty-three such leaves… The forty-three leaves which he was permitted to to keep contaianed portions of I Chronicles, Jeremiah, Nehemiah, and Esther… In 1846 he published their contents…

A second visit to the monastery by Tischendorft in 1853 produced no new manuscripts because the monks were suspicious as a result of the enthusiasm for the MS displayed during his first visit in 1844. He visited a third time in 1859, under the direction of the Czar of Russia, Alexander II. Shortly before leaving, Tischendorf, gave the steward of the monastery an edition of the Septuagint that had been published by Tischendorf in Leipzig.

Thereupon the steward remarked that he too had a copy of the Septuagint, and produced in his cell a manuscript wrapped in a red cloth. There before the astonished scholar’s eyes lay the treasure which he had been longing to see. Concealing his feelings, Tischendorf casually asked permission to look at it further that evening. Permission was granted, and upon retiring to his room Tischendorf stayed up all night in the joy of studying the manuscripts… He soon found that the document contained much more than he had even hoped; for not only was most of the Old Testament there, but also the New Testament was intact and in excellent condition…[2]

Of course, this was not the end of the story. The manuscript came into the hands of the Soviet Union, and remained in their possession until England bought the manuscript for one hundred thousand pounds.[3] Today, this manuscript is known as Codex Sinaiticus, and is one of the most valuable early witnesses we have of the bible.[4]

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